


why would you shatter somebody like me

by misandrywitch



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Cait's birthday fic!!, So here we are, The lost years, remus lupin - Freeform, she wanted something sad, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-10
Updated: 2013-11-10
Packaged: 2018-01-01 03:14:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1039681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His name was Moony and he had everything; three friends and a huge messy secret and his whole life sprawling in front of him. Remus has nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	why would you shatter somebody like me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [punkpadfoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkpadfoot/gifts).



Remus spends the weeks following Lily and James’s funeral being made tea. It is, he thinks distantly as his father places teacup after teacup in front of him on their battered wooden table, a uniquely British response to trauma. His parents want to celebrate Voldemort’s death, they want to help him, they want to express their sympathy and they do not know how to say any of these things. So they make tea.

Dumbledore makes Remus tea too, when he comes to visit 9 days after they bury Lily and James, 6 after they bury Peter., 15 after the Aurors let Remus go. Thousands of people came to pay their respects to the Potters, but the funeral itself had been smaller and private. Remus had sat in between Frank and Alice Longbottom and his mother and father in a row towards the front. Lily’s father, a man Remus had met only once, had been there, looking hollow and washed out. Her sister, and by extension Harry, did not come.

Dumbledore had stood up and spoken about sacrifice and love, and Remus had looked at him in his long black robes, sun glinting off his half-moon glasses, and thought _Albus Dumbledore is so concerned about saving the forest he didn’t see the trees._ He didn’t think this with any real anger, just a quiet realization.

Then people had stood and had given speeches. Alice Longbottom had some kind words for Lily, Kingsley Shacklebolt too. And Remus had stood eventually, and had said simply, “James Potter was the best friend I ever had.” He didn’t cry, but he didn’t say anything else.

A preacher, a nod to Lily’s Muggle father, finished it by reading from his Bible and misspoke. Said _ass_ instead of _ask_ , coughed, and tried to cover it up. Remus had snorted, then thought of what James’s reaction would be. His mouth would twist up on itself in his attempt to hide his laughter. His eyebrows would shoot up and his eyes would glint dangerously behind the lenses of his glasses like they did when he was amused or inspired. He would shoot a glance at Sirius, whose shoulders would be shaking in silent laughter, face screwed up. They had been the dark hair and laughing eyes in Remus’s life, and now one of them was dead and the other, the other…

Remus had burst into tears. It was, so far, the only time he had cried.

Dumbledore sets a teacup, blue floral with a chipped handle, in front of Remus and slides into a chair across from him. Dumbledore looks tired. Dumbledore should never have asked them to do this.

“How are you?” Dumbledore asks, and Remus just looks at him, their hands and the teacup and a game of chess his parents had started last night between them on the table. It’s oddly reminiscent of the last time Dumbledore had come to this house, had played a game of Gobstones with Remus and told him that, against all odds, he was going to Hogwarts. The irony is not lost on him.

“Have you thought about what you will do now?” Dumbledore presses him. Remus shakes his head. The idea of the future, that he must do something next, keep moving forward, go on without any reason to hasn’t even occurred to him.

“I would advice considering leaving England,” Dumbledore says kindly. “I do not think it will be a very safe place for you here, for a while.” He’s probably right. He always is. The tea in between them is getting cold.

“Remus,” Dumbledore drums his long fingers on the table, obviously choosing his wording with care. “I know that this is difficult for you. If you wish to—well—I cannot begin to understand it but you should speak to someone and your experience with Black—“

Remus does not want to hear this. Before he even realizes he has done it, he seizes the teacup and hurls it against the kitchen wall. It shatters, and tea sprays across the sideboard and across the small kitchen window. “You’re right,” Remus says, and he barely recognizes his own voice, “You don’t understand.”

And he turns and leaves the kitchen, down the hall to the tiny bedroom he inhabited as a child. The bed is far too short for him now, the shelves cramped with books, albums filled with photographs, mementoes from Hogwarts. Nothing feels like it truly belongs to him, anymore. The books, the stacks of beat-up journals, the albums belong to a boy who doesn’t seem to exist anymore. His name was Moony and he had everything; three friends and a huge messy secret and his whole life sprawling in front of him. Remus has nothing.

There’s a photograph pinned above the bed, and before he can stop himself Remus picks it up.

It’s a few years old, taken after the last Quidditch match of their seventh year by Mary McDonald. It’s the four of them and Lily, gathered on the edge of the pitch with early summer sunshine on their faces. James is in his uniform, sleeves rolled up and hair genuinely windswept, tall and handsome and seventeen with one hand on Peter’s shoulder. Peter has his face painted in red and gold, and is laughing very hard at something James has said before the camera went off. Lily is tucked under James’s left arm with her arms around his waist, her hair clashing with James’s spare Quidditch jumper, which she’s got on. It dwarfs her. Remus touches her printed face with chilly fingers; in the photograph, James bends down to peck her cheek and she brushes him away, laughing. Her face is shining and pink, caught in a happy moment, frozen forever in ink.

Remus himself is in the far right of the photo, in his school robes and badly in need of a haircut, one hand shoved into his pocket. Sirius stands in between him and Lily, one arm draped onto James’s shoulder, the other resting on Remus’s. He is grinning right into the camera, dazzling it, his teeth very white and his hair falling down into his eyes. Remus is the only one in the photograph not looking towards the camera. He is looking at Sirius.

He always was, he thinks. For years, he always was. Always looking, but he never really saw.

He fooled everyone effortlessly, the way he did everything. Peter, who had looked Remus in the eye at the age of thirteen and promised he would always be his friend no matter what, who hadn’t even had a body to bury. Lily, sarcastic and smarter than all of them and always beautiful but never more beautiful than when she was pregnant, who had died at the foot of her son’s crib. James, whose greatest fault was that he loved too much, whose body had been found without his wand on it. James, who had tried to fight Voldemort in the only way he could, to give his family more time. He had fooled every one of them.

In the photograph, Sirius’s fingers brush against Remus’s arm. He can still feel his fingers there, the warmth of them and the weight of them. Remus can still feel the weight of Sirius’s hands pressed against his shoulder blades, his hair between Remus’s fingers, his laugh against Remus’s throat, his mouth against Remus’s mouth. He knows somewhere deep inside his chest, a heavy, secret part that he’s always been afraid to acknowledge, that he will feel that weight for the rest of his life.

There is a living man named Sirius Black (if life in Azkaban can be considered living), a breathing, flesh-and-blood body and face and voice. Remus knew a boy named Sirius Black too, except the one he knew never existed. Remus tells this to himself for the first time. This, too, he feels he will carry for the rest of his life. James is dead, and Lily is dead, and Peter is dead, and Sirius Black died with them.

Remus sets the photo down and turns back towards the kitchen, squares his shoulders the best he can and prepares to face his smashed teacup. Face Dumbledore, sitting at the kitchen table with sympathy Remus does not feel he deserves. Face tomorrow, and the prospect of waking up to a future where nobody knows there was ever a boy named Moony, who had three best friends that lived together in a castle. A future where he is Remus Lupin, nothing  and nobody more.

Moony might as well have died too, Remus thinks.

Remus squares his shoulders. Remus does not cry. Remus leaves his room. 


End file.
